FRET version 0.0.2 Released

Version 0.0.2 of FRET has gone live on Sourceforge about a half hour ago. I have included some obvious improvements to the commandline tool so the output is now formatted much better. On the libfret side of things, the offset scanning code has been updated substantially, but it is now over-detecting offsets within files - I have to throttle that back in next release. So now its on to working on the next release and firstly what will be included in this - so much to do and so little time. So what is FRET and where is it going?

FRET is a Unix commandline tool that is designed to slot into the Unix tool chain. As there is no point in developing a solution if no hard problem exists, I've looked at a lot of needs within the free software community before going down this road. The problem FRET attempts to solve is that if a developer needs to parse a file format and that format isn't documented (there are lots of potential reasons for this) then (s)he must spend days, weeks or months studying raw files to identify the layout of data within those files. The tools normally utilised to do this are hex editors and binary diff tools. This is inefficient - why not get a program to do what its good at - perform a repetitive, rigerous, boring analysis of a large group of these files and take a guess at the file layout. So thats the end goal: develop a tool that will crunch a large group of files and at the end provide a guess at the layout.

FRET version 0.0.1 Released

Today I published the first version of FRET. I´ve placed a tarball of the source on the project website. It works ok and does analyse files as planned but is very light on functionality. But you have to start someplace and "release early, release often" is the FOSS motto.

Sourceforge project site up and running

Sourceforge.net has accepted the proposal for FRET and an initial version of the project website is now in place. Putting the website itself together consisted of....

• a two day crash course in xhtml and css stylesheets.
• finding a good css template to use for the website, thanks to snop for this.
• configuring the sourceforge site which took a bit of time but is all well documented.
• implementing the site. all coded by hand using Bluefish. I now know I have to automate most of this process or investigate a CMS.

The site works and is LoFi - just the way I like it.

FRET - helping understand file formats

fret is a developers tool that analyses multiple files and attempts to identify the data structures within these files. libfret provides the core functionality and is designed to be integrated with other tools. I am currently working on the development of this tool with the aim of publishing the first version within the next 3-4 days. There is a small code clean-up to be done prior to freezing the code for release. Then its package and test and publish.